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Charter School Scandals, managed by Sharon Higgins, focuses on charter schools and charter management organizations that have found themselves in a precarious situation regarding the law. Check out her work on the Gulen movement.

Deutsch 29 is written by Mercedes Schneider. She connects people with organizations and exposes the tangled web they weave in an effort to privatize public schools in New Orleans and elsewhere. Her book, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education, is a handy reference.

CrunchBase is the world’s most comprehensive dataset of startup activity, and it’s accessible to everyone. Simply enter the name of a for-profit company, and you’ll find out about key staff, investors, and much more.

Edwatch: Teach for America

Teach for America recruits outstanding recent college graduates from all backgrounds and career interests to commit to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools. We provide the training and ongoing support necessary to ensure their success as teachers in low-income communities. Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort.

Bottom Line:

Teach for America is an elitist organization that recruits non-teachers to educate America's most vulnerable students at a premium price. Research shows that the program does harm to children, does not close the achievement gap as claimed, and costs taxpayers millions. Founder Wendy Kopp has no education training or expertise, but she is extremely effective at asking very rich people, corporations, and the federal government for millions of dollars and getting it. Teach for America perpetuates the myth that anyone with a college degree is a teacher. It is a recruiting and placement service. Until 2011, eligibility requirements stipulated that education majors and licensed teachers were prohibited from joining. TFA has gone to great expense to market the company as the “peace corps” of teaching. It is not. Its placements are not teachers and not volunteers. Recruits agree to teach for two years and then move on to a real career. In addition to a regular teacher's salary, TFA placements are given two $5,000 awards to pay for college expenses. The awards are provided by the federal government through Americorps, whose funding is appropriated to aid volunteer organizations in America's poorest communities. An exception has be made for TFA. TFA “teachers” are given preferable access to teaching jobs over regular teachers especially in public charter schools funded by Gates and Broad. TFA hires highly paid administrators, who also are not educators, to “coach” and assist its placements.